I was at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival this past weekend. If you have never been to Jazzfest, and you have any regard for music and food, please make plans to go next year.
While New Orleans still suffers from more than its fair share of racism, you may never see a better example of functional and even blissfully functional diversity than you will at Jazzfest. Old, young, gay, straight, white, black, you name it; this is the people's festival, and the prime directive is celebration. You are reminded here that life is short and fragile and something to be cherished and shared in abundance. You are reminded that so much of what endures as American music, cuisine, and art originated in the Delta, and much of it not in social clubs but in slave camps. There is no room for division of any kind in an environment like Jazzfest, even if one were so inclined.
On Sunday, my wife and I caught a cab from the fairgrounds to our hotel, and the driver -- an African American man in his 40s -- was listening to the Clippers game on his radio. I was surprised to say the least. I asked him if he knew about the Donald Sterling dustup, and he said he had. I asked him what he thought about it. His answer to that question surprised me even more.
He told me that he thought that Donald Sterling was not a bad person, but was in the thrall of something supernatural. "These spirits are always there, beneath the surface, behind the scenes, trying to control all of us. There's good and bad spirits. He been listening to the wrong ones is all."
I'm not a religious person, so in that sense I was neither in tune with nor satisfied by his answer. But as a spiritual person, and as a student of the human psyche, I think he has a point.
I very recently parted ways with a friend I'll call Andy, who had a habit of saying things that were vaguely racist. I had confronted Andy about it in the past and asked him to refrain from making bigoted remarks in my presence. I had even told him our relationship was at stake. He blew it, and we'll never be friends again. But about a year ago I had occasion to ask Andy why he held the view that whites were superior. He spent a bit of time talking about how Anglo-Saxon societies were more civilized, and some other easily debunked claptrap, and then he admitted to me that his views didn't spring from a rational place at all.
"It's just what I believe inside," he wrote in an email that I saved. "I know it's not an evolved position, but I'm too old to change."
Like Donald Sterling, Andy is in the thrall of something that is hard to pin down, and worth understanding better. There are many facile answers. I have heard racism described as a manifestation of the need to feel superior to someone else, but that's as unsatisfying a definition as "because demons." If it is human nature to need to feel superior to someone else, why isn't racism even more pervasive? Why isn't it the rule rather than the exception? I have heard the explanation that fear has many faces, and racism is simply one of them. That rings a bit truer, but it doesn't begin to explain Donald Sterling, who has nothing whatsoever to fear from black people, whose efforts have done nothing but line his pockets with money. Whose judgment or malice could he possibly have reason to fear? He lives in a mink bubble.
When I see or hear racism, it is my instinct to tamp it down. I want it to vanish, and I am glad to see the NBA send Sterling to the dustbin. But it won't change who he is. It won't incline Andy to understand his own racism or its origins. And 5 days later, we're still not talking about the institutional racism that lingers like a cancer inside of our laws, our prisons, our workplaces, our government, and our schools. Stigma isn't working. At all.
You can't cure cancer with hope, prayer, or stigma. You need to put cancer under a microscope and get inside it if you want to understand.
Personally, I don't think we're even close to understanding racism as a society. If we were, so many of us would not have declared it dormant or even dead. The truth is that it is alive and thriving, and while we might know what it looks like on the outside, we are largely ignorant of its deepest nature.
Myself included.